Displaying Pocket PC and Smartphone Screens on Your PC

If you need to do a presentation with a Pocket PC or smartphone, how do you
show the display of your device on the screen so that the audience can see
what's on it? One way would be to use a visualizer
camera to project the device display onto the screen, but the image
quality is usually poor and visualizers are expensive, and so you may
not always find one available.

One good, and free, way to show a Pocket PC or smartphone display on a projector
is to download the free PowerToys Remote Display Control for Pocket PC from
Microsoft's
web site. The Remote Display Control is an application that
installs on both your Pocket PC and your regular PC. Once installed, you can
control your Pocket PC through your keyboard and the screen of the Pocket PC
will be displayed.

As well as presentations, one handy use of the Remote Display Control is
for screen capture from the Pocket PC device. You can capture the Pocket PC
screen just as if you were capturing a conventional screen shot on your
Windows PC. The simplest way to do this is to use the Alt-PrntScrn key
combination.

Installing Remote Display Control on the Pocket PC

Once the Remote Display Control is downloaded and installed on your PC,
and Pocket PC through ActiveSync, you should be able to find it in the
Programs folder on your Pocket PC. The application name is cerdisp.
Tap it and follow through the introductory screen. Click on the Connect
button to start the display (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Starting the Remote
Display control

When you are prompted to enter a hostname, use the default
PPP_PEER and click OK (see Figure 2). Do not change the hostname,
as it will stop the remote display working.

Figure 2. Assigning a host name

You can launch the Remote Display Control from your PC by going to Start
-> Programs -> Remote ActiveSync Display. You should now
be able to see the screen of the Pocket PC (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Viewing the Pocket PC screen on your PC

Using Remote Display Control on the Smartphone

Even though the Remote Display Control was written for the Pocket PC, it
also works for the smartphone platform. I tried the Remote Display Control on
my Motorola MPx200 and it worked perfectly.

To install the Remote
Display Control on your smartphone, follow the same procedure as outlined in
the previous section. You should be able to locate the cerdisp
application on your smartphone by going to the Programs menu. Figure 4 shows my
cerdisp application installed as item 1. The actual location of the
program in your menu will depend on the number of applications you have
installed on your smartphone, but you should be able to find it easily.

Figure 4. Locating the cerdisp application

Press the Action button to launch the cerdisp application. You should
now be able to see the screen of your smartphone on your PC (see Figure 5).

Figure 5. Viewing the smartphone screen on your PC

Since smartphones do not support touch-screens, you have to rely on
keyboard shortcuts to navigate your way on the PC. Figure 6 shows the various
key assignments that you can use to simulate a real smartphone.

Figure 6. The various key assignments of the Remote Display Control for the smartphone